Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  What I remember best about the visit to Aunt Beryl’s are the nights. Mum slept in the master bedroom while Aunt Beryl slept in our whiny boy cousin’s room with him. The spare bedroom was for the rest of us. What looked like the closet door was actually the entrance to the attic. It was locked but still creepy. I didn’t mind, because our instructions were to sleep together, under the same blankets—an exorcism that never failed me. Suzanne was assigned to sleep in the double bed with the glossy wooden frame that looked black in the dark. Ashley and I were supposed to snuggle in next to her. A little cot was brought down from the attic for Heather. As soon as we saw it, we knew the big girls would trade beds. Heather slept in the bed with us while Suzanne took the solo cot.

  Look at me remembering details like these from one week out of my life when I was seven years old. We’ve all heard about repressed memories—about minds erasing things and editing out stories that hurt or scare us most. I’m not sure I believe in it. For me, the things that hurt and scare me, those are what I can’t help but remember.

  No one could have slept easily in quarters as close as those in Beryl’s spare bedroom, especially when it was hot and the sun wouldn’t go down until after nine o’clock. We stayed up, playing, keeping our footsteps from activating the creaks in the floorboards by pretending our beds were boats and the floor was covered in untouchable water. Heather’s big bed was the mother ship and Suzanne’s was the little row boat Heather sent out on adventures. Suzanne invented the game, complete with her role as Heather’s lackey. It was brilliant, really, the way Suzanne would set Heather up as the boss lady. When there was trouble, Heather was presumed responsible for all of it and got the worst of Mum’s moody, frazzled, slapping, ad hoc justice.

  We were four little girls in the room at the foot of the attic stairs of a strange old house, wide awake hours after we’d been put to bed, jumping from mattress to mattress, convinced the women playing rummy in the parlour below were fooled into thinking we were asleep.

  And then Mum opened the door. We hadn’t realized how dark it had got in the spare bedroom until we were squinting in the light from the hall. The doorway framed Mum’s shape in a blinding yellow rectangle. The doorknob in her hand was made of glass and warped the light moving through it, like a grimy jewel.

  We stood stunned as a herd of does in the shadows of the spare room. Suzanne had a pair of sweatpants on her head, the legs hanging down her back like pink fleece ponytails, the waistband clamped over her real freshly pixie-cut hair. Ashley was caught with her nightgown completely tucked into her underpants. The effect was lumpy and goofy and would have been embarrassing if she hadn’t been five years old and pretending to wear a bathing suit. Heather had a pillowcase draped over her head like she was part of a nativity play or a convent. The scene is a photograph shot with the lenses of my eyes so I, the photographer, am nowhere in sight.

  “Girls, get to bed,” Mum said. It wasn’t her spanking voice. It was the tired, tired voice of Aunt Beryl’s sister. “All of you, lie down. It’s okay. You don’t need to be scared to sleep in here just because it’s the room where your grandmother died.”

  I started to speak. “Mum?”

  “It’s okay, Tina. Grammie was old and she was sick for a long time and died peacefully, sleeping in that big bed. Aunt Beryl saw the whole thing. It was okay. So don’t make a huge deal out of it. Everyone dies someday. I will and so will all of you. There’s nothing anyone can do. Just try to get some rest.”

  The door closed and the room went dark. Even though I could still see a little, I knew I’d never been anywhere darker. Of all the things Mum said—the awful things—the very worst were the ones that made us alone, words that called down dark grey desolation. For little girls, Mum was big enough, high enough to see the space around us. She knew we were hung in an empty infinity, our little fingers reaching for each other but not touching, never quite touching.

  Suzanne pulled the pants off her head. She tossed them onto the ground and walked them like a plank, making her way toward the big bed where our grandmother died. Her hands were stretched out, one for me, one for Ashley. Suzanne was guiding us to her cot, away from the bed we could not sleep in anymore.

  As she came toward me, I started to speak again. “Heather?”

  Let me do the math. If I was seven that night, then Heather was eight, nine, ten years old. And she was brilliant.

  She said, “Stop. Where are you going?”

  On the cot, Suzanne lifted her blankets and Ashley crawled inside. “It’s okay,” Suzanne was saying to her. “We’ll make my boat into a tent. And we’ll be inside of it instead of inside this room. It’ll be perfect. We won’t even see the other boat.”

  Ashley burrowed inward. Suzanne waved to me. “Tina, come on.”

  “Hey, you guys, stop,” Heather said. “Suzanne’s bed is too small. And her tent will get too hot. You won’t be able to breathe in there.”

  It was true. And even if we did cram into a tent on Suzanne’s cot, Heather wouldn’t come with us. She’d stay by herself, lost, folded into all those blankets.

  I looked across the room to Heather, a white figure against the black headboard of the deathbed. Her new super-short haircut was just like mine, just like all my sisters’, but she looked like a stranger, like someone who wasn’t even a girl. Her hair was blond and cut close enough to make her look completely shorn in the dimness. The black wood behind her outlined her skull like a hood.

  “Heather, you have to come with us,” I said just before I would have been too scared to look at her anymore.

  She stood up on the pillows, her foot slipping, nearly disappearing into the gap between the mattress and the headboard. “No, you guys come here,” Heather said. “You too, Suzanne. I have a new game, a better one. Bring your blankets.”

  In those days, before the horror of her hospital job, Suzanne was not what I would have called a brave person. But she was an experimenter—a cold little scientist willing to prod and probe, the kind of kid who’d find a field mouse left dead on the sidewalk by a cat and flip the carcass over with a stick. Suzanne balled up her blankets, tossed them onto Heather’s bed, and hopped after them. Ashley and I scrambled to follow.

  “Now this,” Heather began, walking the length of the bed, one hand dragging lightly across the wallpaper, “is not my boat anymore. You heard Mum. It’s Grammie’s boat.”

  Heather bunched Suzanne’s blanket into a long roll and laid it against the footboard of the bed. “See? Here she is.”

  Heather bent to kiss one end of the rolled blanket, as if it was Grammie’s face. She sculpted and fluffed it until I could imagine arms, legs, belly.

  “She’s dead so she can’t sit up,” Heather went on. “We’re alive so we have to drive the boat for her. But she tells us where to go and what to do. As long as she’s with us, we can go anywhere she can go and see whatever she sees.”

  I got it. “It’s Grammie!” I said. I threw one arm around the roll of blankets like I never would have done to the real, frail grandmother I didn’t actually remember. “Long time no see, Grammie. Where are you taking us tonight?”

  “To the sun,” Suzanne joined in. “Grammie says we can go to the sun. She goes there all the time, no problem. Dead people can’t be hurt by anything. They’re the strongest things ever.”

  Ashley laughed and jumped hard on the bed, landing on her knees in the place where our dead grandmother’s ribcage would have been.

  “Ashley, no,” Heather scolded. “You have to be nice. She’s strong but you still have to be good to Grammie or we can’t play the game.”

  Looking back, I think Heather owed a lot of her travels with a ghostly spirit buddy story to Charles Dickens—or at least to the Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol we’d seen on television a few times by then.

  We spent the week at Aunt Beryl’s sleeping all together in the deathbed, each of us careful not to kic
k at the roll of blankets laid out at the end of the mattress. We didn’t smooth out the roll when we made the bed for the day. We preserved its shape, protected it. Ashley and I would watch our older sisters reverently and ceremoniously lift it—Heather at the head, Suzanne at the feet—and slide it underneath the bed every morning.

  “Good-bye, Grammie,” Heather would whisper as we closed the door behind us. “Rest in peace until tonight.”

  I’d like to say I was cured of being afraid to be in the bedroom where my grandmother died. Most of the time, it was true. Allying with her on the boat gave us power over fear and the dark and maybe over our mother’s lonely universe too.

  Brazen with my portion of that power, I sneaked away from dandelion-picking one afternoon, my digging fork still in my hand, and went into the house by myself. I climbed the stairs and walked the hall. I laid my free hand on the glass jewel of a doorknob and turned it, heard the iron grinding in the old latch. And then I stopped. This was not a place I could be alone.

  Tonight, in my living room with my sixth baby, this moment of my childhood is what I am remembering. I’m shivering again, like I was in the hallway of Aunt Beryl’s house, like I was minutes ago when I awakened from my nightmare here in Martin’s house.

  I remember the word in my throat, the one I used in both places to wrench myself free. I could have called any of their names. But what I shouted was, “Heather!”

  Suzanne

  [4]

  My Troy is not a trophy husband. Yes, he is pretty and shiny. He is the kind of husband I would have had made to order when I was twenty-two years old. He’s the kind of husband I would have clipped out of the Sears catalogue and played with as a paper doll when I was seven years old—tall and clear-eyed, charismatic and authoritative, though he’s still fresh and young, exactly like the Sears models in their twenty-dollar, cotton-poly dress shirts.

  Here in his dental clinic, a decade and a half into our marriage, Troy is dressed in white, a medical mask hanging slack around his neck. He looks as capable and impeccable as an actor playing a doctor in a soap opera. Maybe that’s the reason there are always plenty of lady-patients in his waiting room. The women seated along the walls watch as I carry a box through the clinic’s foyer. I don’t pause to ask permission to come aboard, as I smile at the receptionist—the doughy, middle-aged lady I hired myself. I indulge in the intimacy of letting myself into Doctor Troy’s inner office.

  And he is a doctor: a doctor of dental surgery. That’s real. I don’t know why the medical world cordons off the mouth and refuses to consider doctors who specialize in caring for it real doctors. Dental school was a tough programme. The students had to dissect cadavers and everything. And Troy didn’t go there as some kind of second rate, plan B career option. His undergraduate grades were great. His MCAT score was perfectly respectable. He could have got into medical school and been a full-body doctor but—never mind, I’m sick of going over it.

  Doctor Troy joins me in his office, wiping his damp hands on a paper towel left brown to show it’s recycled. “Suzanne? You brought the new footbath down already?”

  I pat the top flap of the box I’ve picked up from the courier depot. “Yep.”

  He steps forward, flexing his fingers. The box contains an ionizing footbath. I know—a footbath in a dental clinic. Dentistry is actually quite competitive in the city. Lots of clinics have started offering enhanced services, which I’m trying hard not to call “gimmicks.” Troy’s specialty is dental detoxification. It started as a comfort for people fretting about their old mercury fillings. Troy drills them out and then uses natural health treatments—essential oils, acupressure, these footbaths—to care for people convinced they’ve been exposed to toxins in every bite of food they’ve eaten and every mouthful of spit they’ve swallowed since they got their first fillings as kids.

  I know how it sounds. I’m a nurse, a scientist. Troy is a scientist too. But this is how his patients want to be treated. They demand it. And so what? No matter what ghastly conventional dental treatments Troy does in their mouths, everyone leaves the clinic happy and smelling like eucalyptus. They might be a bit hypochondriac, but that doesn’t mean Troy is a fraud.

  These new footbaths are simply tubs of warm, swirling water. They’re painless and soothing and, by the end of the treatments, their water is brown or orange or green or some other sickly colour. Sometimes dark flakes or chunks of foam are left floating in them, like the gunk washing up on beaches where no one wants to swim. According to the box insert, its biological mechanism is “ionization.” The new machine I’ve brought to the clinic today is identical to the one already in use here.

  “Did you try it out already?” Troy asks.

  “No. But it should work just as well as its twin, right?”

  Troy shakes his head. “Think, Suzanne. We can’t just turn a new machine on patients without having someone we trust test it first.”

  “Okay. Fine, I’ll take it home for a trial. But I won’t be able to bring it back today. I’ve got to go over to Ashley’s shop. She’s been calling all morning. She won’t say why, but she wants to see me in person.”

  He’s skimming paperwork stacked on his desk as he says, “Intriguing.”

  I slump against the top of the box. “I’d rather be home straightening things up before your mom gets here tonight. There’s still a huge pile of laundry.”

  Troy waves his hand, keeps skimming. “Save the laundry for Mom. She wants to do the laundry for you. She wants to do everything for you.”

  “Yeah, but I like to have everything perfect for May. I’m happy when I’m getting everything right. May and I are the same that way.”

  He smirks. “Just carve off a little slice of your precious domestic paradise and let Mom have it. Be the perfect daughter-in-law by easing up on perfection for a few days.”

  I smooth a ridge of sealing tape that’s lifting off the edge of the box. “Irony is so stupid.”

  “Come on,” Troy says, “It won’t kill you to spare some outstanding feat of housework for Mom to do as soon as she hits the ground.”

  I flinch. “Troy, do you have to say it like that?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have to talk about your mother using violent expressions?”

  He stops reading, creases surfacing on his face, making him look his true age for a moment. “You mean, ‘won’t kill you?’ That’s the opposite of violent.”

  “No, not that.”

  “‘Hits the ground?’”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not violent either, Sue. It’s a cute reference to World War II paratroopers. Right?”

  I try to laugh. “Is it?”

  Troy drops his paperwork, advancing on me, moving to finger the acupressure point between my eyes—the magic spot that’s supposed to keep me from overreacting to his charm. “You’ve got lighten up about Mom. She’s safe and she’s fine. No one takes better care of people than Mom does, and that includes taking good care of herself. If you need to worry, it’ll have to be about someone else.”

  I nod my forehead against his fingertips.

  Ashley [5]

  They each take their sweet time getting here for today’s emergency sisters’ meeting in the back of Dash Fireplace and Monument. That’s the name Durk and I gave our masonry shop. Durk and Ashley—Dash. Get it? It’s perfect. “Dashley” was a little too right on. And my sisters said “Ashurk” made us sound like a couple of ancient Mesopotamian warlords.

  The “Monument” part of the name sounds impressive, but all it really means is we’ll install or repair gravestones for money. I don’t mind the work, but Durk would rather we didn’t spend so much time in cemeteries. He’s not scared. Don’t get me wrong. He agrees when I say if the people buried in any of the city’s cemeteries were all to stand up at the same time they’d look like the crowd from the mall: grandmas and grandpas
, teenagers with premature driver’s licenses, party-guys who just got paid, a few moms and babies.

  It’s not about ghosts—nothing supernatural. The effect the cemetery has on Durk is perfectly natural. It’s got this energy that upsets Durk’s chi, rankles him right down to the life force in his solar plexus, and ruins his day. I know. I can hear myself sounding like a poser Western loser. But there’s no arguing with the way Durk has to pop a whole roll of antacids to fix his stomach after a gravestone job. He’s sensitive, tuned in. I like it.

  Heather got us into monuments through her funeral business connections back when we needed the contracts to keep the masonry shop a going concern. We can afford to be choosier about the work we do now, but “Monument” is already printed on all our cheques and stationery. So here we are.

  I’m the one who called this meeting. It’s one of the very worst kinds of emergency sisters’ meetings: the kind where one person can’t be invited. Today, Tina will be missing.

  Durk is outside the office, in the rearmost bay of the shop, picking and stacking astoundingly heavy crates of bricks using the forklift. Thank God for the forklift. No really, I’m thankful, no sacrilege intended. For the first year we were in business, Durk shifted the crates with nothing but a hand truck and a cheap manual pallet jack. It was barely possible—probably took years off the lifespan of his spine. Troy took pity and gave us samples of minty essential oils from his clinic. I was supposed to rub them on Durk’s back. We’re all for organics and purity, but as far as we could tell, Troy’s oils were nothing but fancy, teeny, pricey vials of the same Deep Cold ointment we could have bought at the drugstore in big, cheap handfuls.

  Through the indoor window of my office, waiting for the last of my sisters to arrive, I watch Durk standing on the edge of the forklift with his shirt off, driving the machine like it’s a blip on our old Atari console. His back doesn’t look injured from here. It looks fine—way more than fine, actually. Sometimes I sit at my desk and get stalled, stunned, a bit hypnotized watching my beautiful, half-broken cyborg working his smooth, mechanized, back-and-forth, pivot-lunge. Sometimes, but not right now.